The Church must do better than its previous lacklustre attempt to engineer
consensus over Women bishops

The rejection of the Measure on Women Bishops will come as a heavy blow to many inside the Church – but also to many outside the Church, who will find the decision hard to fathom. Yet I remain sure that it is only a question of time before the Church of England will take this next step.

The Church lives constantly in the tension between patience and faithful reform. On the one hand, it is bound to remain true to its given nature. On the other hand, it is bound to reform and change with each generation, as the Holy Spirit continually renews the Church.

In a famous, if rather overlooked, essay written 50 years ago, Yves Congar, the renowned French theologian, addressed the subject of true and false reform in the Church. Congar, a Roman Catholic, was attempting to reach out to the Protestant denominations and re-engage with the spirit that had given birth to the Reformation. Like all Christians, Congar believed in unity. But he was also realistic about the differences, diversity and disagreements that caused division.

In his essay, Congar starts with the virtue of patience. He moves on to exploring how impatient reform can lead to the reformers believing themselves to be persecuted. And although the essay ends with a plea for unity, and for continued patience and dialogue, Congar’s revolutionary insight was that Church leaders ultimately have a responsibility not to be too patient.

In other words, a moment comes when a decision must be made. Change must come. Hopeful patience may prove to be wise for some while, but pointless waiting is merely prevarication posturing as discernment.

The Church knows a great deal about waiting. It waits for the coming of the kingdom. In Advent, a season we are about to enter, it waits for the coming of Christ. In Lent, the Church waits for the radical transformation of Easter. Each of these periods of waiting is hard, yet anticipative; but it is neither pointless nor endless. The Church waits in hope because it believes that – through waiting – wisdom, discernment and new insight will enable a purer and clearer leading of the Holy Spirit. All Christians know this can be difficult and demanding; but that for a flourishing Church and the mature spiritual life of individuals, it is essential.

In respect of the ordination of women, there has already been much waiting. The earliest campaigners for women’s ordination – those on the fringes of the suffragette movement, such as Maude Royden – could barely have imagined that it would have taken more than a century for women to receive equal treatment in the Church of England.

It was 1912 when Royden began editing Common Cause, the journal of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies. Five years later she became assistant preacher at the City Temple in London – the first woman to occupy this office. After the Great War ended, she founded the Society for the Ministry of Women, campaigning and speaking for the ordination of women well into the Forties.

Royden did not live to see General Synod passing a motion in 1975 stating “this Synod considers that there are no fundamental objections to the ordination of women to the priesthood”. Nor the General Synod, in 1978, asking the Church to “prepare and bring forward legislation to remove the barriers to the ordination of women to the priesthood and their consecration to the episcopate”.

The first women were ordained to the diaconate in 1987, 25 years ago. The first women ordained to the priesthood followed soon after in November 1994, with 38 of our 44 Diocesan Synods voting in favour. And for the recent debates on women in the episcopate, the numbers were even better, with 42 out of 44 dioceses voting in favour of women bishops. Maude Royden, you might think, would be rejoicing in heaven.

But some will never change their minds, and it is because of this that the duty of our Church leaders not to be too patient now comes more sharply into focus. To place this in context, I have only to recall a conversation with a diocesan bishop opposed to the ordination of women. I asked him about the implications of already having women bishops in the wider Anglican Communion.

What would he do, say, with a male priest who had been faithfully offering priestly ministry overseas for many years, but was ordained by a woman bishop? And if that same priest now asked him for permission to officiate in his diocese when he returned home? Would he grant the licence? No, he said. Would he insist on some sort of conditional re-ordination? No, he said. Then what, I asked? He replied, simply, that he would ordain. That there was no question about this. The man was not a priest, and he never had been.

Herein lies the rub, I think. The legislation before Synod on Tuesday was already a “compromise”, in the original sense of that word. That is to say, it was a co-promise: an agreement that together we would move forward mutually, not severally.

It was this that the Synod had set its mind to. That the Church lost sight, so early, of a simple one-clause measure, is a real tragedy. And it was this failure of leadership, ultimately, that led the Church inexorably and slowly to Tuesday’s result.

How, though, can the Church of England move forward? As a body, we seem to have been quite slow in learning that diversity, disagreement and differences cannot simply be managed into consensus. The political, synodical or managerial solutions that have been proffered so far have singularly failed to inspire and galvanise most of the debaters. And the public, understandably, has switched off in droves.

What is needed, I think, is better and inspiring theological leadership (not just clearer or louder) that will lift the debate into a different dimension. This was lacking on the floor of the Synod debate on Tuesday. And its more general absence from the Church quickly leads to rather pedestrian debates about the rights of groups and individuals, how they compete and conflict, and how to find compromise.

The only sure result here is that everyone loses. Indeed, that was Tuesday’s result: nobody won. The Church lost; the campaigners for women bishops lost; and the apparent victors lost – but by a margin that gave them the strangest of pyrrhic victories. And the public lost, too. It has lost confidence in a Church that is supposed to serve the nation, not just the qualms and proclivities of small, squabbling interest groups.

What is not needed, I am sure, is for the debate to descend into Left-Right divisiveness. Some are already eagerly talking about the Equality Act and relishing the prospect of political interference. Others are inferring that the principal problems are falling attendance, with further inferences and accusations of being out of touch with modern values. None of this will work, I fear.

At present, and in our attempts to organise the Church and manage its diversity, we are often guilty of trying to “give unto thy servants that peace which the world cannot give” to ourselves. But it is a gift of the Spirit, grafted through conversation, conflict and slow consensus that gradually build us into communion. The genius of Christianity lies in its contestability; therein lies its richness, too.

If diversity could have been easily managed, the New Testament would perhaps have given us some pointers and Apostles and Early Church Fathers would probably have led the way. Alas, it is something of a conceit of modern times to suppose that the Church is an organisation in which diversity can be ironed out; difficulties managed; and the Church homogenised into a discourse of uniform clarity for the media and the public at large. The Church is a body that seeks unity in the midst of diversity; it does not aspire to an ecology of managed uniformity.

So the only way forward is for the Church to be, as the Apostle once remarked, “transformed by the renewal of our minds” (Romans 12:2). Here, the word “renewal” can be taken in at least three senses: a recovery of something lost; improvement of what is in the present; or a complete exchange of the past and present for a new future.

Just what kind of renewal the Church of England both seeks and needs is the key to the future of this debate. For this, we need outstanding theological leadership, and not a mere suite of managed compromises. And yes, more waiting. But perhaps in hope?